Special Episode: James Dobson, Eugenics, and the Pure American Body
In this special edition of Straight White American Jesus, host Dr. Brad Onishi reflects on the harmful legacy of James Dobson, who just passed away. Known as the founder of Focus on the Family, Dobson's teachings on the nuclear family, gender roles, and corporal punishment have left a traumatic impact on evangelical communities. Onishi connects Dobson's work to the broader themes of eugenics and Christian nationalism, noting Dobson's early association with eugenicist Paul Popenoe. The episode discusses how Dobson's views on family structure, purity culture, and authoritarian parenting continue to shape American society and politics today.
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Welcome to a special edition of Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad O'Nishi, author of Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism and What Comes Next, and the Founder of Axis Mundi Media.
I'm joining you today because today is the day that James Dobson has passed away.
Many of you will know much about James Dobson, but for those of you who need a reminder or a refresher or just hearing about him because of what's on the timeline right now, he's the, among other things, founder of Focus on the Family, which in the 1980s and forward was one of the most influential media outlets and sources of parenting advice and marriage advice for evangelicals in the United States.
It's hard to overstate how influential Focus on the Family was in those years.
In contemporary terms, it was in some ways like Charlie Kurt's outfit, TPUSA, but with a focus more limited to child rearing and gender and family.
It was something that was a precursor in some ways to the manosphere and the podcast world that now exists on the American right.
But Dobson himself was one of those figureheads who inspired reverence and also much, much vitriol.
There are many.
evangelicals who experience the teachings of Focus on the Family who are now in many ways traumatized by what they learned there.
I'm not going to go into all of the details about Focus on the Family.
I'm not going to do a deep dive.
I'm not going to do a history.
I think what if you don't know about it, what you should know is that Focus on the Family taught a bunch of things that are familiar if you listen to this show.
Number one is that the nuclear family, the heteronormative nuclear family is the bedrock of civilization.
For James Dobson, heterosexuxual marriage and raising kids in that kind of family structure was the key to not only a great church, not only to a great home, but to a great civilization.
If you read and listen to Dobbson, you will hear him say things like gay marriage will destroy the earth.
And that's because he believes that any deviation from the heteronormative nuclear family is a deviation from God's plan such that the entire structure, not just of one's life or one's individual family, but the entire earth, the entire civilization will be destroyed.
That's a common refrain on the conservative Christian right these days and has been for some time, but Dobson was one of the first and clearest on that point.
Dobson was also a very open and vehement advocate for corporal punishment.
He wanted Christian parents to discipline their kids and to spank them and hit them as much as was needed to get them in line.
One of the things that I think Dobson really exemplifies is the idea that God and parenting is about order.
You've heard us talk a long time about, for a long time, about the ways that certain Christians really envision God not as a God of love or compassion or warmth, but as a God of order and discipline, of authoritarian submission.
Well, Dobson really embodied this idea in the form of advice on how to raise your kids.
He was somebody who thought that the only way to have a good family was to hit your kids when they got out of line.
So you'll hear him talk a lot about the nuclear family, heterosexual marriage, and how the entire human way of life depends on that being in order.
Now that of course includes, if you were wondering, ideas that we've heard a lot about in the news recently from Pete Hegseth and Doug Wilson and others, and that is that men and women are not equal or the same, that they are complementary with men of course having the role of leader and the head of the household, the head of the church, the head of society, and women as the submissive part of that couple.
Women need to submit.
Children need to be punished.
And if they do, the home will reflect God's vision for society.
And that will be the building block of the You're going to hear a lot about this over the next few days.
You'll see op-eds, you'll see think pieces, you'll hear people do deep dives on podcasts.
I want to just link this to something I talked about on Monday.
Monday, I spoke with Nafiz Ahmed, who wrote the book Alt Reich.
And he talks a lot about eugenics in that book.
He talks a lot about the ways that fascism was among many other things, a eugenic project that was trying to breed a superior race and to make sure that quote unquote, inferior races were not able to replace the superior Aryan and European races and peoples.
If you listen to that, we drew connections to people like RFK and Stephen Miller.
But one connection we didn't get into was Paul Popino and James Dobson.
I wrote about this in my book, Preparing for War, and I just want to share some of that now.
So what is eugenics?
Eugenics is the study of human genetics with the intent of learning how to increase the occurrence of positive genetic characteristics.
Now you might think of that in many different ways, but one of them, of course, is positive characteristics being equivalent to certain phenotypes and racial characteristics.
Audrey Clare Farley is somebody who I have interviewed on this show and spoken to extensively about this, and here's what I learned from her.
James Dobson trained with the eugenicist Paul Popeno.
This was one of his mentors.
This is one of the men who taught him about families and civilization and marriage.
Popeno's work, along with that of other eugenicists, inspired Hitler and the sterilization program he implemented in Nazi Germany.
Popinot's fear was that white people whom he viewed as superior to all others would be replaced by other races who were outbreeding them.
Sounds like the great replacement theory.
In 1930, he founded the American Institute of Family Relations in Los Angeles in order to formulate strategies for encouraging white couples to remain married and produce more children.
By 1960, it was one of the biggest marriage counseling centers in the country.
Now, Popinot encouraged women to not go to college or enter into the professional world and definitely did not like the idea of interracial marriage.
He wanted a racially pure society and he wanted the dominance.
He wanted to engineer and design the dominance of the white heterosexual family in opposition to all others, including black and indigenous families.
Now what I talked about with Nafiz Akhmed on Monday was the funding of quack science.
even after World War II that promoted and expanded eugenics and eugenicist teachings.
Popinho was part of this.
He mixed quack science with white supremacy and a regressive understanding of gender and sexuality in order that white women might outbreed, quote unquote, all others.
Now, James Dobson worked for Paul Popano in the late 1970s.
Now, these are the years that I talked about with Nafiz Ahmed.
These are the years that the Heritage Foundation was trying to expand eugenic studies, funding them, taking them overseas to the UK.
Audrey Clare Foll, excuse me, Audrey Clare Farley put it this way when I interviewed her a few years ago.
As his assistant, Dobson authored all kinds of publications which were basically Popino's ideas for public audience.
Ideas about male and female differences and strict gender norms, the dangers and evil of feminism, and how it's going to lead to society's decay.
So what I'm saying here, y'all, is in the years immediately before Dobson became a household name in white evangelical circles, before he became one of the most influential Christian leaders of the 1980s and 90s, before he became the voice that millions of evangelicals listen to in the car,
on the radio, on the way home from school, on the way to work, before he became the man whose books instructed evangelical fathers on how to be really masculine, how to hit their children in order to keep them in line and to make their wives submit.
Before he gave out advice about what it meant to be a good Christian family, Dobson was working for one of the most influential eugenicists of the 20th century.
Here's what Audrey Clare Farley also told me.
Dobson viewed homosexuality and feminism as grave threats to the family.
He would dismiss domestic abuse.
He would sometimes accuse women of faking it just to get attention.
Even where he believed abuse was real, he never really thought of it as a good reason for divorce.
Everybody had to stay in their marriage.
Dobson also, like Popinow, discouraged his audiences from interracial marriage and warned against the prevalence of welfare queens.
Welfare queens is, of course, a dog whistle about black women who live in poverty and who are supposedly unwilling to work and living off the government.
One of the takeaways for me about Popinow and Dobson is the idea of the pure family.
A pure family in order to have a pure society.
A pure family ordered in the right way, excised of all pollution and infection and mixing.
A pure family in perfect, submissive alignment.
If you have that, you'll have a great society.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Now, there's another man who enters into the picture, as I write about in the book, and that is George Gilder.
George Gilder was a staunch anti-feminist and the founder of the Discovery Institute.
Gilder believed that men are sexually destructive beings who, without the soothing presence of a wife, will tear down society through their aggression and violence.
Men are naturally designed to be not just aggressive but destructive, Sarah Mosiner told me, paraphrasing Gilder's argument when I interviewed her about this.
According to Gilder and Dobson, men are inherently powerful and authoritative, but they require sexual satisfaction and stability in order to harness their energies.
Women are weaker, more passive, and without an inherent authority.
So the idea from Gilder passed on to Dobson is you have to contain men and all their savage, destructive sexual energy.
And that's where marriage comes in.
Dopson used this pseudoscientific theory as a theological frame.
He argued that this is how God designed men and women.
He argued that this is why women must submit to men, why women must meet men's sexual needs, and why any hint of queer sexualities, polyamorous relationships, anything else would spell doom not only for the individual but for America.
Our culture, like ancient cultures that ultimately were destroyed in large part due to their own moral depravity has been severely weakened.
A stable family unit committed to the truth and precepts of the Bible was once the foundation and backbone of our nation.
That model is now the exception, not the rule.
We've been hearing that for a long time.
That's what James Dobson said.
Now, one of the things I want to leave you with today is that this is the basis for purity culture.
Many of you grew up in purity culture.
Many of you have heard about it.
Purity culture is the evangelical culture that encouraged young teenagers to save sex for marriage, but it also included so much more.
It turned any sexual thought into the equivalent of adultery.
It created this whole structure and framework and scaffold of gender roles.
It taught young women that it was their fault if men lusted after them and that they should dress modestly so as not to tempt the men who, as we just heard and learned, were savage, destructive, sexual beings.
Purity culture was a huge part of the 1990s, and purity culture, if you've listened to our series, Pure White, with Sarah Mosner, was also the idea or the path forward for those who envisioned it to a renewal of the United States.
There's something to take away from Dobson's theology and politics, this very quick and dirty tour through 20th century eugenics, and the ideas of gender and sexuality as they were taught in many, in millions and millions of homes in the 80s and 90s and continue to be today.
Christian nationalism is America's original purity culture.
It's the vehicle for constructing a pure nation and society.
Purity culture is a projection of all the gendered, racial, and societal fears that white Christian nationalists harbor onto the canvas of teenage flesh.
The wager is that if we can discipline the violence, or excuse me, the viral teenage body into submission to a patriarchal, heteronormative, and often racialized mode of being, then those bodies will be the foundation for a rightly ordered national body.
When we see behind Dobson, Popinow, and Gilder, and their patriarchal views of sex and marriage and civilization, we can see that purity culture, the idea of this pure family, with no infection of interracial marriage or sexual impropriety or queerness was cultivated in a decades-long culture war waged by white Christian men.
And if you know this show, you know that Dan Miller, my co-host, wrote a book called Desire Dysphoria and the Body Politic.
And if you read that book, he makes this ingenious argument that every nation and community envisions their collectivity, themselves together, as a body.
It's a metaphor.
What does your body look like if you are the United States or France or Japan or anywhere else?
When white Christian nationalists imagine the real American, they think of John Wayne or Donald Trump, maybe Nancy Reagan, not Barack Obama, not Kamala Harris, not Alexandria Ocasio Cortes, much less a trans teenage of color or a queer immigrant.
They're model American looks a certain way.
What Dan says is that American Christian nationalism expresses a desire for a return to a mythologized social and political order.
It's about order.
This is why you have to hit your kids.
This is why you have to make your wife submit.
Because if you make her submit and if you get them in line, you are not only creating a good house, but you're creating the right kind of America.
This also means that alt all those things that are out of order, the queer family, the single mom, the childless cat lady, as JD Vance might say, the trans teenager, these are monstrous and grotesque to the Christian nationalists.
When white Christian nationalists feel entitled to occupy the place at the top of the order, they will dehumanize by calling all other people infections as diseased.
If you think about the ways we're hearing about immigrants these days, it corresponds in a scary way.
Purity culture is a function of Christian nationalism because Christian nationalism is the desire for a pure Christian nation.
What we're seeing today is an attack on anybody who is not a white Christian.
We're seeing cities occupied.
We're seeing mass deportation take place.
We're seeing people approached and asked for their papers just for being brown.
We're seeing black neighborhoods taken over by federal law enforcement and military.
What we're seeing is the attempt to recreate what was never actually real but imagined as a white Christian nation.
James Dobson was a big part of that.
He was one of the co-founders of the Alliance for Defending Freedom, which these days is a powerhouse that brings Supreme Court cases about transgender sports and whether or not website designers should have to design websites for gay weddings and so on and so on.
ADF is behind so many of the cases that have weakened separation of church and state in the country.
Well, he was one of the founders.
So eugenics, Christian nationalism., the pure American body.
This is at least one of the legacies of James Dobson.
And I think all of you can see how this legacy ricochets into the future, excuse me, into the present.
And so many of its foundations are still haunting and in many cases persecuting us today.
I'm Brad Onishi.
Thanks for listening today on this special episode.
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